At present, one of the most important functions of user equipment such as an intelligent mobile phone, a desk-top computer and a laptop computer is to obtain and play streaming media from the Internet. The traditional streaming media transmission is realized based on a special streaming media transmission protocol, for example, Routing Table Maintenance Protocol (RTMP), Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Multimedia Message Service (MMS) Protocol, etc. However, when the transmission of streaming media is based on these special streaming media transmission protocols in the actual network environment, an efficient network path for data transmission typically cannot be established due to the existence of a firewall and a Network Address Translation (NAT) router.
In view of this, Apple Inc. has put forward the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, according to which, a continuous media stream is sliced into multiple Transport Stream (TS) slice files, and an M3U8 index file (i.e. a playlist file) is generated correspondingly, and the TS slice files and the M3U8 index file are stored in an HTTP server. The TS slice files and the M3U8 index file constitute an HLS media stream. In this case, a terminal such as iPhone, iPad, iTouch and Mac computers obtains the M3U8 index file from the HTTP server via the HTTP protocol, and further obtains the TS slice files according to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) provided in the M3U8 index file, thereby playing the streaming media. Because the streaming media data are transmitted as per the HTTP protocol, the firewall or proxy would not cause any trouble to the transmission; moreover, the time length of a TS slice file is very short, so that the terminal may rapidly select and switch to a code rate so as to adapt to the playing under different bandwidth conditions. At present, however, many widely used terminals other than those from Apple Inc. are incapable of playing a media stream based on HLS protocol; moreover, the media stream based on HLS protocol cannot be played off line by even a terminal capable of playing a media stream based on HLS protocol. As a result, the video watching experience of a user will be severely degraded.